On 05-Jan-2017 09:25, Lyndsy Simon wrote:
Based on the feedback I'm seeing, it looks like we made a very good choice to retire our OSX packaging. I admit I was a little worried, but suv's judgment was 100% right, and as anticipated our deliberately *not* providing it is stimulating others to step in and fill the void. With 0.93 on Gtk3 it sounds like we'll have opportunities for even better OSX packages.
That and OS X is notoriously difficult to support - a binary built for one version may or may not be upward compatible, and may or may not work on the same release with different hardware. This isn't just an open source issue, it bites programs from commercial software providers as well. For instance, there is currently a problem in some software with Retina Display machines running 10.12.x mangling dialogs, where that same software works fine on older nonRetina Macs running the same OS versions and on Retina Macs running 10.11.x.
Conversely, Windows upwards compatibility has usually been very solid. Binaries for software which run on Windows XP typically run just fine on 7, 8, or 10, and 32 bit apps work on 64 bit OS variants. Of course backwards compatibility isn't guaranteed and a 64 bit app is useless on a 32 bit OS variant.
All that said, it would be a good thing if there was at least an unofficial and unsupported source for Mac binaries of Inkscape. Mind share is important for the long term health of open source projects, and a lot of graphics types prefer Macs to Windows or Linux. These tend not to be the sort of people who are going to be setting up virtual machines on their OS X boxes in order to run another OS to access a single application.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech